Perspectives mixed on city's missing art

Graphics

Artist Jose Lozano often tells vibrant stories of Chicano life in his paintings, but the fate of one of those paintings tells a different kind of tale – one of confusion and loss.

Newport Beach bought his painting “White Shoe,” Lozano said, after he placed first in a city art show held between 1985 and 1987. He remembers being surprised because it depicted Latinos at a party, when “everything else at the show was sailboats.”

Since then, his work has been shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, UCLA Armand Hammer Museum and the Orange County Museum of Contemporary Art. Cheech Marin, whose personal collection of Chicano art has been shown at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, owns several of Lozano's works.

But the city of Newport Beach doesn't know what happened to “White Shoe” and about 32 works by other artists. Officials say they were likely discarded over time because they weren't worth much or were damaged and not worth fixing.

“It's not a very inspiring image,” Lozano, a Los Angeles artist, said recently after learning the city doesn't know where his painting is.

“They haven't valued what they've acquired if it goes missing,” he said. “Someone is not doing their job.”

But Councilwoman Nancy Gardner, who works closely with the city Arts Commission, called the missing art a “tempest in a teapot.”

“Nobody likes the fact that everything wasn't perfect,” she said, noting that much of the missing artwork was bought in the 1980s, before she and most city employees were around. “Nobody knows quite what happened as far as I can tell.”

City spokeswoman Tara Finnigan called it a record-keeping mistake. Art was taken off the asset list – meaning the city discarded the pieces for various reasons – but it stayed on the art inventory list.

In recent weeks, the city has put some new art-handling policies in place, including one that uses barcodes to track art the same way the city tracks library books, Finnigan said.

In Laguna Beach and Brea – cities that purchase and display public art – artists get a chance to take back any work before the city discards it.

Both cities comply with state and federal laws that ban the alteration or destruction of art, officials said.

“You can't just say, ‘I don't like that anymore' and take it out,” said Siân Poeschl, who manages public art for Laguna Beach.

From a legal standpoint, losing art could be considered the same as destruction, said Sarah Conley Odenkirk, a fine-arts attorney and member of the Director's Council for the Fowler Museum at UCLA.

Beyond that, she sees ethics issues.

“Is this the right way to treat art?” she said. “You can't just acquire work and do whatever you want with it once you have it.”

Newport officials did not respond when asked whether they knew of the arts laws.

A lot to lose

Laws aside, the sheer number of missing pieces left artists perplexed.

“That's a lot to lose,” said Rick Ferncase, another artist whose work is missing. A media arts and film professor at Chapman University in Orange, he said he sells his photos today for up to $1,800.

He recalled Thomas Garver, then head of the Newport Harbor Art Museum, giving his photograph “Jacuzzi de Chirico” the top prize at a 1979 city art competition.

“He had a thing for photographs,” Ferncase said.

Later, he remembered seeing it hanging at the former City Hall on Balboa Boulevard.

After that, its history is fuzzy.

The one person who might know, Jana Barbier, who oversaw the city's art collection for more than 11 years, retired last month. She hasn't responded to repeated requests for comment from the Register. However, before she left the city, she gave the Register an inventory in April showing that the location of 30 out of 186 artworks was unknown.

When City Manager Dave Kiff learned of the lost art, he asked staffers to track down the pieces and hunted for them himself.

“There's a time in a city's history when it steps up to a level of cultural and art destination,” he told the Register at the time. “We're taking that step.”

You can't toss art

As for Ferncase, he said he believes they “tossed” his photograph, a Jacuzzi scene with his then-girlfriend.

“It's probably not anybody in Newport's idea of art,” he said.

But tossing out art isn't something most public agencies or cities typically do.

Cities like Laguna Beach and Brea and public agencies like Los Angeles Metro, which commissioned Lozano to create art for its La Brea station last year, call artists first before getting rid of art.

Artist Steven Squire would have appreciated a call. His painting is also missing.

“It's kind of sad,” said Squire, who now lives on Kauai. He remembered the city asked to display his paintings and then bought one of two humpback whales.

“It was one of my first shows before things started to take off,” he said of that time in the mid-1980s. His paintings later showed in Laguna Beach, San Francisco and elsewhere.

“I hope it is seeing the light of day on a wall somewhere,” he said.

But Pasadena artist Kenton Nelson isn't mourning the loss of his print, “Newport Salute,” and isn't even sure how it ended up in the city's collection. Back then, in the late 1980s, he was designing advertisements for Fashion Island.

Since then, he has designed four New Yorker covers; his oil paintings go for $40,000, he said. Some hang in the Albertina museum in Vienna, Austria – a museum where works by Pablo Picasso and Mark Rothko are also displayed.

“Some stuff doesn't stand the test of time,” he said.

Donna Klaasen Jost doesn't agree. Even now, nearly three decades later, the South County resident still remembers creating “Riviera,” a colorful pastel of someone
running on the beach.

It's also lost.

Her feelings, she said, have nothing to do with the value of “Riviera” in the art world.

“An artist always feels close to their pieces,” she said. “If they were going to get rid of it, I would've liked it back.”

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